Book Case

By Stephen Greenleaf

To save a small publishing company, John Marshall Tanner searches for an anonymous scribe

John Marshall Tanner has spent most of his life avoiding parties—an easy feat for San Francisco’s most introspective private detective. Nevertheless, when one of his closest friends, publisher Bryce Chatterton, finds himself in desperate need of a private eye, Tanner joins him at the party thrown to announce Periwinkle Press’s latest publication—but there’s little reason to celebrate.
 
The publisher’s financial backer has decided to pull the plug on Periwinkle unless Chatterton can come up with a bestseller fast. Chatterton thinks he has his hands on a surefire hit—but he’s not sure if he can print it. The book is an anonymous tell-all, implicating some of the city’s most powerful in a chilling miscarriage of justice, and Chatterton needs the author to corroborate the story. Only Tanner can track down the mysterious writer, but are the secrets between the pages of this manuscript worth dying for?
 
Book Case is the 7th book in the John Marshall Tanner Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Feb 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504027373

Stephen Greenleaf

Stephen Greenleaf got a BA from Carlton College in 1964 and a JD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967. He served in the United States Army from 1967 through 1969. He studied creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1978. He wrote fourteen John Marshall Tanner books to date. Greenleaf lives in northern California with his wife, Ann.

Book preview

1

I’m not certain whether the affliction originates in genetic disinclination or environmentally induced aversion, but I’ve always been more a recluse than a celebrant. Most of my lies have been uttered to evade the sticky dangle of a social occasion, and most of my alcoholic intake has been consumed to ease me through those festivities I’ve been too timid or unimaginative to avoid. As a result, parties and I pretty much parted company early in the last decade, when staying home with Malamud or Mahler or Montana began to seem preferable to most of the alternatives that came my way—cocooning, I believe they call it now that the tastemakers have followed my lead. So it was distinctly out of the ordinary for me to be parading my hard-won nonchalance on the fringes of a handsomely refurbished loft on the trendiest corner south of Market, with something called the Sunday Punch sloshing over the rim of the plastic glass that had been foisted on me the moment I arrived, as I waited for my host to find time to tell me why I’d been invited to spend an evening with half a hundred guests who were far too young to have been confronted by life’s more vicious vicissitudes, at least not the sort that made my own little ledge of the world a precarious perch.

As out of place as a parent at a prom, all I knew as I looked for something sufficiently potent to wash away the lingering sweetness of my drink was that Bryce Chatterton had been a friend for twenty years, and all I guessed was that, given the nature of my business, he was in some kind of trouble. If that was the case, I would do anything I could to help, within reason or without. A dozen years ago, Bryce had ushered me across a nasty wrinkle in my life, when my failure to become either professionally consequential or personally connubial had spawned a depression that only Bryce’s relentless applications of common sense and good cheer had lured me out of. As a result, I had owed him a debt for a long time. As with all my debts, I would feel better once it was paid off.

The name on the building read PERIWINKLE PRESS, broadcasting its presence to the ever-less-literate nation by a block of off-white neon featuring an appropriately leafy logo that entwined itself among the blinking letters and garlanded them with blossoms of literally electric blue. Bryce Chatterton was the founder, president, and sole surviving editor of the enterprise. Ostensibly, the purpose of the party was to announce Periwinkle’s publication of a collection of poetry by the young woman who was now backed into the far corner of the room by the press of her gushing admirers, her smile just slightly less dazzling than the head she had shaved to her scalp in honor of the occasion. All of which was further proof that I must have been present for some other reason—I haven’t read a poem since the day Walt Kelly died and took Pogo and Albert with him.

Since in attitude, age and attire I was easily branded alien, my tour of the room was unimpeded by fellowship. I was not entirely bored, however—there’s a hot new parlor game making the rounds in San Francisco these days. It’s called Earthquake, and the object is to relate the most terrifying, heartwarming, scandalous, or apocalyptic experience that has at least a tenuous connection to the October tremor or its aftermath. The winner, of course, usually tells a tale that combines at least three of those attributes while suggesting he somehow managed to experience the event while at Candlestick Park, on the Bay Bridge, in the Marina, near the Nimitz, and under the bay in a BART tube, in an amazing feat of simultaneity. But the best this party could come up with was some suburbanites’ competitive comparison of how much water the quake had sloshed out of their in-ground pools.

Thankfully, the evening was not without its other charms, most of which consisted of the literary snippets that wafted my way as I trailed my host around the room:

I hear they only printed two hundred copies; that’s barely enough to supply her ex-husbands. Of course nowadays what with computerized typesetting they can go back to press in a minute. I think Doubleday printed my book on Lapland life-styles one at a time.…

He got a five-figure advance from Harper for a coffee-table book about owls. Who knew owls were going to be big, for God’s sake?

I heard the film rights went for a million, then when Redford decided to do Beanfield instead they just stuck it on the shelf. But why should she care, right? I mean, she can make her own movie for that kind of money, as long as she doesn’t have to pick up the cocaine tab.…

He told me Mailer read it and loved it but Random’s list is full till ninety-two and Meredith’s not taking on anyone new. I was going to send it to Pynchon, but only his agent seems to know where he is and she’s not telling. I guess I’d write a romance in the meantime, just to tide me over. I mean how hard could it be—a mansion, two rapes, and a seduction and they sail off into the setting sun.…

He told me I didn’t really want to write, I only wanted to ‘be a writer.’ Can you believe it? And to think I was actually going in on a condo with the creep.…

I’m almost thirty pages into it. Conduce says it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, but she thinks it should be a play because my dialogue’s so today it totally overwhelms the narrative. At least that’s what Candace says. So I was wondering if you’d take a look and tell me what you think.…

Her editor moved to New Zealand to herd sheep or something and the manuscript disappeared in the process, only Hortense didn’t know it for six months. In the meantime, she started seeing a channeler in Emeryville who convinced her that novels were spiritually irrelevant, so when she finally got it back she fed all nine hundred pages into the barbecue and cooked a Cornish game hen over them. She always was an Anglophile, you know.…

The only intelligent thing he ever said to me about writing fiction was, ‘Just because it happened, doesn’t mean it’s good.’

I continued my misanthropic drift, avoiding the few people who seemed inclined to talk about something other than themselves, trying to keep the punch within the rhomboid confines of the plastic glass, keeping one weary eye on my host. Weaving his way like an eel through the gaggle of distaff groupies, Bryce Chatterton was a dervish of wit and hospitality, keeping glasses topped up, fingers filled with food, and people whose propinquity was solely geographical apprised of each other’s deliciously eclectic life-style. Whenever our eyes met, Bryce invariably signaled that he’d be with me in a minute, he had just one more thing to take care of, he hoped I understood, but somehow that minute never came. As at every party I’d ever attended, no matter where you had come from or where you wanted to go, time stopped well short of satisfaction.

Meanwhile, Bryce’s wife occupied a companionably overstuffed chair in the corner of the room opposite the guest of honor, her eyes buried in a book she was careful to demonstrate was not the volume being feted that evening. Normally, such outré behavior would be chastised by a self-appointed social arbiter, but since Margaret Chatterton’s money had underwritten the entire decade of Periwinkle’s perilous existence, no one chose to take umbrage at such aggressive aloofness. Not out loud, at any rate.

The next time I looked her way, I caught Margaret watching me, a furrow in her brow and a purse to her lips. But instead of acknowledging my glance, she lowered her eyes to her book and pretended neither our senses nor our sightlines had never tangled, a reaction only too indicative of the state of our mutual regard.

I’d first met her husband back in his bachelor days, when we began to run into each other at various clubs around the city in pursuit of our mutual passion for the bebop trumpet. Periodic encounters at Basin Street West and El Matador eventually evolved into the bar-ballgame-bullshit triumvirate that was the cornerstone of male friendship in the days before estimations of present and prospective wealth became the exclusive subject of discussion in the city.

When we met, Bryce had only recently abandoned the literary aspirations that had been fueled by his idolization of Scott Fitzgerald and his Stegner fellowship in Stanford’s famous writing program. A clerk in a Post Street used bookstore—an antiquarian bookshop, its owner dubbed it in order to justify the markup—Bryce was barely earning enough to stay afloat in the increasingly precious nectar that was post-sixties San Francisco. But because even more than jazz, books were his major passion, he was content to be a minor player in the minor minuet that passed for the city’s literary scene.

Eventually, Bryce began to appear with less and less frequency at our haunts. Since both the quantity and quality of American jazz had already begun its steep decline, I thought that might be the reason for his absence. But what I hoped was that, in contrast to my quarter century of failure in that regard, Bryce had found a woman he liked well enough to marry.

Most men are by nature unskilled in the things that matter. Indeed, it is often the very size of their ineptitude that makes them marriageable, in need of a complementary union to function at anything resembling their best. Because Bryce Chatterton was less able than anyone I knew at the mechanics of existence—Bryce couldn’t fry an egg, for example, or fill out a deposit slip—I was cheered when I learned his rescue had been realized.

Margaret had seemed in the nature of a coup for Bryce, someone who both shared his love for books and possessed a net worth that could afford him a regular diet of the pricey first editions that were locked away in the long glass case at the rear of his employer’s musty establishment. Though the outward signs were thus encouraging, and I wished the two of them nothing but the best, the downside was that our friendship failed to survive the marriage. Partly because such friendships rarely do, partly because Periwinkle was founded shortly thereafter and immediately knotted the loose ends in Bryce’s days and evenings, and partly because Margaret clearly felt that private investigators occupied a slot in the social strata somewhere below men’s room attendants, an opinion that seemed to slip a notch after she was introduced to me.

Nonetheless, I was pleased when Bryce began to ascend through the local literary stratosphere and when his bon mots began to appear in the city’s most prominent gossip column almost as frequently as Strange de Jim’s. He would telephone me periodically to bemoan the premature demise of one of our musical idols, or rhapsodize over the discovery of his latest genius, and we would exchange heartfelt pledges to get together soon, for baseball or for lunch. But except for a handful of rather rote occasions and an all-too-recent disaster during a party at my apartment, we seldom followed through. Suddenly ten years had passed, and when I received an invitation to the publication party it was out of a blue, as blue as Periwinkle’s tiny bloom.

When Bryce swept past me yet another time and tried to give me something resembling a mollusk pursuing a sunburn on a Ritz, I asked him how long he thought it would be before we could talk. Bryce is both thoroughly polite and relentlessly optimistic, which tends to overload his expression with a guileless mix of astonishment and glee. In answer to my question, his eyes blazed so brightly behind their steel-rimmed glasses it seemed certain he intended the next book on Periwinkle’s list to be entitled Talks with Tanner.

Soon, Marsh, he promised. I’m going to shoo them off to the Café Roma in ten minutes. I’ve arranged something special for Matilda tonight—they’re pouring a new drink in her honor, named after the new book. Cointreau, cinnamon, and clotted cream; I think she’ll be pleased, don’t you?

I glanced at Matilda. Her pate was glistening from the warmth of her reception and she was clutching her book to her side as though its gossamer imagery would fly away if her grip loosened even slightly. The poems were about traffic, I’d heard someone say—cars and trucks and what happens when you ride around in them. The collection was entitled Gridlock, and the jacket photograph featured Matilda in a bikini and a chaise longue, recumbent on an endangered species—an empty parking space within a mile of Union Square.

As one of Matilda’s more unctuous friends began extolling her talent at the expense of Amy Clampitt, Bryce glanced furtively at his watch. I’ll meet you in my office at nine, Marsh; you can go on back, if you like. There’s scotch in the credenza, lower left—I know that’s more your style. But first I’ve got to try to convince a young postmodern to send her new collection to Periwinkle. She’s clearly ready to break out—with the right promotion and some suitably bizarre behavior on her part, I think I can make her the next Kathy Acker.

With a flip of his hand, Bryce went off to foist the Ritz on an impressively outlandish young woman who seemed more insulted than thrilled by the attention, which no doubt made her personality congruent with her prose. When Bryce was well into his spray of flattery, I surveyed my surroundings more closely, since it was my first visit to Periwinkle’s inner sanctum.

The party was corrupting what was normally the conference room. Darkly handsome, it was furnished in the timeless style of an English men’s club, with ponderous leather chairs and heavily tufted chesterfields. Beneath the gleaming brass reading lamps suitably esoteric tomes were displayed on deeply oiled occasional tables. The wall at my back was entirely a bookshelf and its opposite was mostly glass, beyond which a leather bar and a fabricating plant mocked us from the ungentrified side of the street.

On the wall to my right, precisely paneled squares bore framed and spotlighted covers from Periwinkle’s meager backlist, matted in a brilliant blue. Although I read my share of reviews and spent more than a few of my Saturday mornings browsing through the Recent Acquisitions section of my neighborhood library branch, few of the titles were familiar to me. Which might have explained why Margaret Chatterton had a scowl on her face when I looked her way a second time.

When I bowed toward what looked like the standard edition of her disdain, she unexpectedly motioned for me to join her. Margaret was one of those women who demands a fealty that exceeds my understanding and is thus beyond my power to confer, which makes me feel vaguely culpable. I obeyed her summons immediately.

It’s been a long time, Marsh, she said, the makings of mischief in her eye. Are you enjoying your wallow among the literati?

I looked down at the gray-streaked hair, the narrow nose, the vertically striated neck, the reluctant breasts that barely disturbed the drape of her cashmere dress. About as much as you are, I’d say.

Her smile turned snide. Now you know how I felt at your Super Bowl party.

I wouldn’t have been offended if you’d stayed home, Margaret.

"I wouldn’t have hesitated to offend you; it was Bryce I was worried about. I had to make sure he didn’t make any more of those ridiculous wagers."

"Well, you got the job done. As I recall, no one did anything remotely ridiculous that day."

She looked up at me as she fiddled with the jewel that was suspended at her throat like a drop of her husband’s blood. I did put a damper on the whole affair, didn’t I?

By the time the 49ers had launched their winning drive, I had been the only one left in the room, the rest of my guests having retired to the Caffé Sport to escape Margaret’s running commentary, which made Howard Cosell’s sound like the Reverend Schuler’s. That about covers it, I admitted.

She closed her book with the snap of a steel trap. So what. Football is sadistic and its trappings are sexist. It ought to be banned. With that burst of intellectual fascism, Margaret turned toward the crowd that continued to buzz with pleasure at nothing more apparent than its self-regard. It’s hardly encouraging, is it, to know that the majority of people in this room think literature begins with Erica Jong and ends with Tama Janowitz.

Her words buckled with a contempt so vast it must necessarily have encompassed herself. Since there wasn’t anything else to do, and since if Bryce did plan to engage me professionally it would probably be Margaret who paid the bill, I tried to jar her out of it. You’d prefer they were discussing Jane Austen, I take it. Or maybe Ayn Rand.

She scoffed. Actually, my disposition is more a matter of money than poetics. She gestured toward the guest of honor. Would you like to know how much it cost me to publish Matilda’s little exercise in blank-verse egoism?

How much?

She licked her lips. "Well, let’s see. With a standard trim size like Gridlock’s, a small page number and small printing, the figures run something like this—three thousand for the cover design plus another three for the jacket; twenty dollars per page in plate costs, times a hundred pages equals another two thousand; plus a dollar ten per unit in PP and B, plus—"

What’s PP and B?

Paper, print, and binding. Which is another twenty-two hundred. Plus a dollar for every book we estimate we’ll sell for promotion, which is two thousand more. Plus the royalty to the author, which is ten percent of the cover price, which in this case means a dollar a book. Which gives us … what?

Something over fourteen thousand dollars.

"Right. And that’s just hard cost, not fully allocated—I haven’t even hinted at overhead yet, which, given the size of our mortgage, is a horror I won’t bore you with. Margaret glanced morosely at the wall across from us. Suffice it to say, all those precious little poems and precocious little novels have cost more than two million dollars to immortalize. Net loss to me, needless to say. She chuckled without a trace of mirth. That’s exclusive of the cost of the stimulants necessary to revive the poor souls who decided to read them."

That’s a lot of money.

Margaret looked at me with a glint of triumph, as though she suspected I had given Bryce the first book he’d ever read and was therefore to blame for his addiction. Do you sense a little desperation in the air, tonight? she asked abruptly.

I frowned. Not particularly. Why?

This is his swan song, Margaret said, the final words a spondee of satisfaction. I’ve warned Bryce that at the end of the fiscal year I’m pulling the financial plug. When I do, I’m afraid his lovely little Periwinkle will rapidly begin to wilt.

I’m sorry to hear that, I said truthfully.

Why?

I thought of the hours I’d spent in the presence of nothing but a book, beginning at about age six with a boys’ biography of Kit Carson. Laid end to end, the hours would encompass years. The best years of my life, arguably. Because books are nice things to make, I guess, I muttered with an odd embarrassment. And because Bryce enjoys his work more than anyone I know.

Margaret pointed toward the wall. "How did you like Thin Wind? That was our best seller: eighteen hundred copies."

I, ah …

I’m sure Bryce sent you a galley. What was your favorite part? The celebrated blizzard scene?

I guess so. Sure.

Her laugh was the comeuppance I deserved. "Thin Wind is set on a banana plantation in Costa Rica; there is no blizzard. That is, if you discount the blizzard of adjectives that is that particular novelist’s most egregious affectation."

There was nothing I could say that would take us anywhere I wanted to go, but in a mysterious shift of mood, Margaret looked up at me with uncharacteristic contrition. Don’t be embarrassed, Marsh; actually, I’m flattered that you cared enough to lie to me. And I didn’t intend to be mean—I’ve told you this so you’ll help if Bryce starts behaving childishly after I’ve taken his toy away. I do care for him, you know, she added as though she knew that among more than a few of her husband’s friends it was a subject of debate.

In the echo of her final sentiment, I glanced to where Bryce was regaling a bevy of presumably would-be writers with one of the publishing anecdotes he related so irrepressibly, this one having to do with an autograph party at which no one but the author showed up. He doesn’t look too broken up over Periwinkle’s imminent demise, I observed carefully.

Because he doesn’t think it’s going to happen.

Does all this have something to do with why I’m here? I asked when she didn’t elaborate.

Bryce thinks he’s found a substitute for me, Margaret muttered, her gaze fixed on her husband, her injured feelings obvious. Or for my money, at least.

So Bryce has a mistress, I thought. Good for him, I thought next, then wondered why I wasn’t ashamed of myself. An investor, you mean?

She shook her head. A book.

I was confused. What book?

A new one. Not yet published. Something Bryce feels could be a true best seller.

I felt myself redden. There are already plenty of books about San Francisco private eyes, I demurred insincerely. Both real ones and imaginary ones.

I expected her to try to convince me otherwise, but Margaret’s cockeyed squint meant I was refusing an offer that hadn’t been made, which made me redden even further. I had blurted the unnecessary disclaimer because the reference to a mysterious masterpiece had exposed my deepest secret—a secret I’d kept even from my secretary and Bryce Chatterton: some day I wanted to write a novel. Hatched during the reading rampages of my college years, the desire apparently remained so strong some three decades later that it had led me to grasp at an opportunity that wasn’t real and indulge myself in images of dust jackets decorated with my photo and book spines resplendent with my name.

Margaret seemed telepathically attuned to my discomfiture. "Bryce doesn’t want you to write a book; he wants you to read one. Her smile turned thuggish. You do read books, don’t you, Marsh?"

Once in a while, I said, angry at myself for my irrational fantasizing, angry at Margaret for so readily rebuffing me. But what I get paid for is reading people.

She raised a brow. Oh? And what do you read in me?

A mystery, I said roughly. Gothic, I’d say.

Heavens, Margaret Chatterton replied airily, then made as if to probe the assessment further.

But I didn’t give her the chance. Before she could question me again, I excused myself and headed for a mood modifier more reliable than punch, put to a pathetic rout by the resurrection of what was at once the most persistent and arrogant of my ambitions.

Before it was summarily stolen from me, I considered teaching the most noble profession of them all. Though now I am in many ways its victim, I still think that: the most noble; and the most treacherous. Perhaps that is nobility’s essence, that it cannot exist without peril. Which would explain why, in a society that so maniacally seeks to obviate risk, a champion is so seldom seen.

Homage to Hammurabi, p. 31

2

The office was much smaller than the conference area, in its relentless clutter and confusion less a room than a cavern carved out of a mountain of books and manuscripts. The only items of decor not related to publishing and Periwinkle were a stack of Bang & Olufsen components in a cabinet behind the desk and an array of photographs of a young woman that was on display in the many nooks and crannies of the room.

After examining the stylized stereo close enough to decipher how to turn it on, I pressed some buttons until I got the tuner locked on KJAZ and the opening bars of a James Moody ballad, then got comfortable in the desk chair, feeling exalted and at home in the cozy room. To pass the time I leafed through a recent Newsweek, stopping only to read the cover story on the delectable Michelle Pfeiffer and a review of the new novel by Richard Russo. I put down Newsweek and picked up Publishers Weekly. An article listing the American media companies now owned by foreign corporations lent further support to a common prognostication—that by the end of the century America will be little more than a satellite of foreign powers, vulnerable to their policies and preferences, significant solely as a market for their wares.

The radio shifted to the Brecker Brothers, and I grew as restless as their rhythms. After discarding the dregs of the Sunday Punch in a pot of pansies and filling the void with Bryce’s Black Label, I left the desk and wandered around the room, pulling books off the shelves as I went, taking the best measure of a man there is next to examining his diary or his tax returns.

Most had been written by well-known Bay Area authors, present and past, from Frank Norris and Dashiell Hammett to Herb Gold and Anne Rice. Almost all were first editions and many were inscribed to Bryce with sentiments ranging from careful courtesy to effusive thanks. After three or four examples of the latter, I found myself taking pleasure in the fact that so many eminent people shared at least one of my opinions—that Bryce Chatterton was a nice guy.

After enjoying an elegantly brief tribute to Bryce from the pen of Alice Walker, I turned my attention to the manuscripts. There was a yard-high pile of them beside the desk. I selected one entitled Rampage. The postmark indicated it had been mailed to Periwinkle some three months before, from a man in Hobbs, New Mexico. I thumbed aimlessly through the bright, crisp typescript, wondering if the author rushed to the mailbox each day awaiting word of its fate, wondering if Bryce had become too jaded to marvel any longer at the dreams that lay pressed as hopefully as four-leaf clovers between the pages he so routinely received and presumably, in all but the rarest of cases, dispatched with a rote thumbs down.

I stopped at page 251: The blood from her breast spurted onto my face like wine from a goatskin, and was thick in my throat as I drank it. For some reason the image made me laugh. Mercifully, the door to the office opened and spared me a further dose of what Faulkner might have become if he’d tried to sell as many books as Stephen King.

Although I was expecting her husband, it was Margaret who succeeded me behind the desk. Bryce will be in shortly,

Reviews for Book Case

[ecw0647 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The first sentence of this book, describes me to a tee: “I’m not certain whether the affliction originates in genetic disinclination or environmentally induced aversion, but I’ve always been more a recluse than a celebrant.” Exactly. Marsh is hired by Bryce to help save Periwinkle Press. Bryce received a manuscript, one that he thinks is truly magnificent. He wants Marsh to read it and then find out who wrote it. What makes it interesting and tricky is that the novel, about a man falsely convicted of sexual harassment and abuse, is unfinished and in the missing section promises to reveal who the false accuser was and what revenge he intends to extract. Of course, the best way to track down the author is to assume the book is non-fiction, but that could raise issues of libel. But then, if the book is a novel, libel could also be a problem for the publisher since all it takes is one person to come in and proclaim that s/he thought the protagonist was someone in particular for libel law to become an issue. Apparently if you disguise a person’s identity by having them do several nefarious things, and someone still recognizes the individual, then you could be guilty of defamation since the portrayal wasn’t accurate enough!The trail leads Marsh into a corrupt world of influence, private schools, and hidden agendas. Again, the positive comparison to Ross MacDonald is warranted. I remain astonished that Greenleaf never attained similar stature. Greenleaf does exhibit a strong sense of moral outrage at the disparities of life in San Francisco during the late eighties (the book was published in 1991.) “...the gap in both assets and attitudes between the rich and poor has become cavernous, the America that allows businessmen to coin money in the name of junk bonds and stock options yet requires the poor, illiterate woman to fill out a six-page form to qualify for food to feed her children, the America whose poor contribute a higher portion of their income to charity than the rich, the America whose best and brightest are no longer rewarded for creating things of value but for selling off our resources to foreign companies, the America whose politicians want to force everyone to pledge allegiance to the flag while hundreds of thousands of men whose allegiance to that flag included bravery and bloodshed must find shelter in doorways and subway tunnels and abandoned sewer pipes.”The beginning of each chapter has a paragraph or two from this "great" novel, Homage to Hammurabi," as well as longer passages within the novel, a tricky conceit since it's supposed to be the next great American novel and, for my money, doesn't appear to be so.Greenleaf’s books are filled with righteous anger; this one especially so. Great read. On to the next one.

[susandennis-139327 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This guy has written a bunch of books and I've never really liked any til this one. The story is just fascinating.